The first tropical storm of the year in the western North Pacific, Wutip (蝴蝶), has formed over the South China Sea and is expected to move toward Hainan Island off southern China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today.
The agency said a tropical depression over waters near the Paracel and Zhongsha islands strengthened into a tropical storm this morning.
Photo courtesy of the Central Weather Administration
The storm had maximum sustained winds near its center of 64.8kph, with peak gusts reaching 90kph, it said.
Winds at Beaufort scale level 7 — ranging from 50kph to 61.5kph — extended up to 80km from the center, it added.
Forecaster Kuan Hsin-ping (官欣平) said Wutip is to continue moving west-northwest and is expected to turn north near Hainan Island toward Guangdong, China.
While the storm would not directly impact Taiwan, it is to push the entire low-pressure belt northward, Kuan said.
As a result, Taiwan is expected to be impacted from today.
Kuan said that Hualien and Taitung counties in eastern Taiwan, as well as central and southern Taiwan, would be prone to localized heavy rain.
Coastal areas are also expected to see higher waves.
Wutip is expected to remain a tropical storm and would likely make landfall soon after, making further intensification into a moderate typhoon unlikely, Kuan added.
According to CWA records, this is the latest in the year that a Pacific storm has formed since 2016.
That year, the western North Pacific saw a total of 26 typhoons — close to average.
However, a strong Pacific high-pressure system and unfavorable atmospheric circulation in the first half of the year kept typhoons from forming before the end of June.
In 2016, the first typhoon was Nepartak, which formed on July 3, while the latest first typhoon on record was Tropical Storm Nichole, which formed on July 9, 1998, the data showed.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS